Standard definitions--why trust them in this case?
If your definition of a soul is creative output...well then a soul does indeed exist. However, this is not the standard definition.
Cris ... we're human beings. All of us six billion "souls" on this hallowed rock:
•_
... this is not the standard definition: If we were examining the wavelengths that determine "red" to the human eye, some degree of standardization is necessary. However, when it comes to more subjective things ... we're human beings. "Nielsens", Billboard Hot 100, Mr. Blackwell's Worst-Dressed List ... tell me about each in that sense--is the upcoming CBS Victoria's Secret lingerie show really "good" television, as its ratings will imply? Is Britney Spears really a "good" musician compared to a Thom Yorke, Chris Cornell, Rufus Wainwright, or Brian Wilson? Is Mr. Blackwell's list really important at all? Bearing in mind that if you're not careful around a geologist, you might actually argue the "definition" of a pebble, rock, or boulder (there are, in fact, very specific demarcations) ... what is the value of "standard definition"? After all, if we look at Christianity in America, we can see what this "standard definition" of moral beneficence has earned us.
The thing is that I don't assert that we know what the soul is. When I was little, I learned (somewhere) that it was physically stored somewhere in the right side of my abdomen. Amazing, eh?
Hopefully, you can follow this; I almost can't. Last night, Tig (pregnant and due in ... 3 days) mentioned that it was nice to get up and walk around. I smiled and said, "Well, your body
wants to live." At which point, she surprised me by making an associative turn I never thought I'd hear from her:
Don't all things naturally attempt to return to their ground state?
I know what she's referring to; she learned the idea in a chemistry class when the professor was explaining the layout of the elements in the periodic table.
But I wasn't prepared for the question at all, so I gave her a multivalent (ha!) answer:
• The conversion of fuel into energy in the body constitutes this process
• The decay of the body can be said to constitute this process
•_Life is merely a range of rations of matter and energy, but what makes life self-perpetuating is another mystery entirely.
For the purposes of last night, it was a huge digression, but part of what I slept last night thinking about was that something that makes life self-perpetuating.
This, in and of itself, might be considered a soul. Or, perhaps, the "spark" that makes our self-awareness so different from other animals. Mind you, I expect that these have scientific explanations to a certain satisfactory degree, but I'm having an inner conflict with our tendency to use modern evidence and ideas to condemn old ideas; what happens if we translate the old idea into the modern ...?
What "could" a soul be? Well, the mind-uploaders might have an answer for that question someday. Perhaps it's a strictly bio-electrical phenomenon. I still hold to my conclusion that life is not a chance occurrence but a statistical necessity in the Universe, so it's not as if a soul
must be mystical.
If you trust the standard definition of the soul, then the argument freezes there. We doubt everything else about Christianity, for instance ... why not doubt the definition of the soul? Without hostility, sarcasm, or otherwise--for it might be possible to interpret it that way--the result of trusting the Christian definition of the soul in order to argue about it seems more a tool to beat down an idea rather than to explore its possibilities.
Do you trust an ancient, possibly deluded people to define the terms of consideration you award a concept?
Ah yes, then just call me a killjoy
Hardly a problem. You can call me Al.
But, tiassa I was thinking of you when I said those things. I distinctly remember you chastising other members many times for assuming that everyone only talks about the Christian god.
Slightly different, but your point is still taken.
What bugs me is when an atheist who has rejected the Christian god that he or she learned in the world applies that to all Gods, even those they may never have heard of. This is the height of arrogance and contradiction, as it makes the atheist religious.
However, in this case, as I have pointed out above, you're letting people you don't trust set the considerations for the definitions.
In other words: Should someone someday find a "soul", do you really expect that it will look like people have described in religious philosophy?
I was trying to at least meet your request and as stay neutral as I possibly could.
And I do thank you. But is there not a possibility that the limited linguistic scope of the past might stain the present considerations?
Is there any one idea of a soul? No. There are many diverse ideas of what the soul is. If we limit ourselves to the characteristics of any one idea, we limit our scope of inquiry. However, we are also limiting our scope of inquiry if we accept at face value what is said. Jesus touched a man and instructed him to wash in the river, and a skin infection was miraculously healed. Actually, I can do the same thing for myself. It's called sand. Or ask Revlon or Clinique, or anyone who makes exfoliant makeup. Now, we can argue whether or not Jesus had the healing touch, but as such we are trusting the intellectual limitations of the past. But if we discuss whether or not Jesus knew something about that condition and helped someone with that knowledge, the conversation no longer seems incredulous. Admittedly, it takes the wind out of Christianity's sails, but do you or I care if that is the result?
Or:
Rise up off your pallet and walk. Have you ever closely watched a faith healer? I'm convinced it's a psychological trip; I can invoke similar states of desperation in people if I try--it's not a pleasant exercise, and experience tells me it's not a good way of going about things. Nonetheless, must we accept for argument that Jesus miraculously healed a paralysis? Or is it easier to believe that "Jesus" (we need not believe him a single entity, but might regard him as a legendary composite) said or did something to snap someone out of a psychiatric condition? (Freud saw a number of "glove paralysis" cases which he tied to sexuality in the Victorian age; a woman masturbates, feels extreme guilt, somehow loses use of her hand in a psychosomatic manifestation of the perceived godly vengeance.)
A man with a limp? How about "Dr. Jesus the Chiropractor"?
What I would ask you to recognize, then, is that as a result of the prevalence of Christianity in our posters' cultures, even non-Christian ideas will be stained by that. Even if we reject the Ten Commandments, you and I might agree that murder is wrong. Why? There is no real objective answer until we understand the "purpose of life", for it may be that murder and war are actually forms of selective breeding and reduction; manifestations of natural selection. Sure, it's grim, but if we pretend otherwise, it's only on faith. Whence comes that faith? We who were raised in the presence of Christian evangelism understand morality through those terms often enough, because even when it wasn't put into the idea of what God says, it was still the "way things were and are".
In addressing the soul, then, I would suggest what I do when addressing the notion of God--retreat to the most basic expressions of the soul and determine what is accreted since. Usually, the reasons for those accretions will be clear in any cursory evaluation of the historical circumstances of the time.
But a spirit world was assumed or hoped for, right? The fact that the emphasis was on other aspects does not dilute my assertions if the final objective was a hope of cheating death.
Poetic expressions of death are common. I would hope to die in a moment of nobility than of neutrality or malice. Is that religious? Perhaps. But I'd rather go down saving my daughter from a rapist than pick up a rifle and die killing Iraqis, for instance.
Beyond that, it is a weird thing; to my experience, it only ever came up when we were asked about it. And sometimes it seems the Summerland and other ideas were merely extended from poor interpretations of terms like Tir na Og, which may come down to a way of saying that one died nobly, as opposed to one going to a noble place. It's all a matter of how much you trust the source to take it literally. I actually take very little at its face value; if I did, I would truly hate people, for most that I know are dishonest and downright mean. But that dishonesty is symptomatic, so I don't take it as a necessary expression of the true self. Likewise, I tend to think of the expressions of the afterlife I found among pagans largely convenient capsules to put it into terms understandable to Christian or other seekers who inquire.
Too seriously? Isn’t it the fundamental goal of such institutions? In Christianity – “believeth in me sayeth the lord and ye shall receive everlasting life”. Isn’t the whole point of being a Christian to achieve immortality? If a soul doesn’t exist then this dream is just that, a dream.
Such a condition, however, seems to necessitate exploration of the soul. Christianity, furthermore, exhibits a prohibitionary, controlling aspect; they've put too much emphasis on determining the objective (?!) classification of the soul, and have failed to celebrate its function.
Would you rather dance to the music, or wonder why the music makes you want to dance? Some days, people just want to dance. But in wondering why they want to dance, they might come up with silly notions like the supremacy of country-western (line-dancing), classical (minuet--an early form of line dancing), Top-40 (must-look-sexy-while dancing), ad nauseam. Some days you just have to dance. And on those days you wonder about why you dance, it is important to bear in mind that other people dance. If you do not, the best you can do is to speculate why you dance. With a better and broader data set, you might find reasons to rationally theorize why anybody dances.
Did you know that, technically, the Charleston is not a dance?
Now you are just a being a pessimist. I hope for more of the human race.
I hope for much more, too. But in the face of mounting evidence, it is hard to turn that hope into faith. In the end, the proof of faith is that we work toward hope.
As we learn more and education improves then I am sure that superstitions will fade.
Do you have faith in family members? Why is it important to be any more tolerant of them than of anyone else? Because they're family? But why? For what objective reason?
In the face of mounting evidence, it is harder and harder for me to maintain faith in certain members of my family. On the one hand, they're offended when I call them selfish. To the other, they're proud to call themselves selfish. What to do?
My faith in them may compel me to endorse inappropriate human conduct. It sucks, but how much do I want to yell at them when nothing else works? After all, they're family. (Which is curious to me because family is a legal term, not a spiritual term in this sense. Spiritually, I do have a family that warrants my trust, but the rosters are different.)
I agree one can’t stop people dreaming and hoping, and we shouldn’t want to stop that, but I would hope that hopes change from beliefs that something must be true because they want it to be true, to one of, it would be nice but we simply don’t know.
I agree, but the problem seems to be one of paradigm. Take a look at the culture immediately around you: it is generally materialistic in the less-than-good sense, and self-centered. How can I be so sure? Well, you're in California, of all places. Cupertino or thereabout, as I recall. Part of what makes the economy tick down there and all over the country is self-centered materialism. How does this seemingly ill-conceived concept become "good"? I think the transformation you describe would directly undermine the general American economic system (I'm not picking on the Valley specifically here, for I live near Microsoft) and thus the finances, which are what people find important. In order to change
that condition, something very basic must change about how people measure success and failure, right and wrong, good and bad, self and other in the world. I'm aiming for a paradigm shift. I don't expect to win this one, but if I live my life striving to make things better for others, my life will improve naturally because of the reduction of turbulence in the factors affecting my life. It's a living ... barely. But someone has to try.
From gullibility, irrationality and superstitions, to informed and rational objectivity. Perhaps I am just dreaming that that might occur, but then I am the eternal optimist.
And I heartily hurrah that optimism. I must also encourage it to transcend itself.
To take an extreme example: I don't think George Bush is truly evil. Nothing ever is. But he really thinks he's doing the right thing. In order for him to do what's truly right, even according to his own conscience, he must shake off the fetters of politics, pride, and religion, and start looking at the world from a different perspective.
Now, while nobody at Sciforums really equals that degree of the problem, I think it's a stark enough example to have functional value.
However--patriotism ... what is it but a religious advocacy of one's own nation?
Remember the 1990's, when the Republicans espoused your freedom to be rich above all else? Tell me we don't worship money. Human life considerations are not as important in the decisions that Americans make as monetary considerations. Success is measured by how much you have? And now we live in a world where we're being fascists toward companies if we want them to be
honest?! How? Why? The only common link is money.
It used to be that you could get away with rape in Alabama quite easily--rape a poor woman. Why? Because the state wouldn't charge without running a "rape kit", but the state felt no obligation to assist the victims of crime with the $1200 medical expenses involved in getting those results. Things have changed, and that's a positive sign, but everybody likes the dominion and financial advantages that can come from running for political office on an anti-crime platform. You'd think they could have done it originally because it was the right thing to do.
How is it that the right thing can "cost too much"? I live in Seattle, where we just poured a billion dollars into two sports arenas, and while I approve of them, I can't figure out why nobody's willing to spend a billion dollars on education.
Oh ... that's right. Money. What do I mean? We could pitch the arenas as "investments", projecting
dollar amounts of future profit. You can't do that with schools.
Thus, as an example, to fix what's wrong with this country, we need to change people's basic perspectives on what is important. I submit the same in addressing the problems of religion.
Most Christians, for instance, don't understand why they believe. Instead of ridiculing them (as people often do) or otherwise making self-examination scary, people should be a little more supportive of one another. Instead of assuming merely that the other guy is out to screw me, why not understand that the other guy is doing the best he can, as well? Doesn't mean I have to let him screw me. But playing the cutthroat only adds another cutthroat to the fray.
Perhaps, but then as atheism starts to bite harder as it is starting to do now then many atheists will also see your perspective and will want something more as religions decline.
Perhaps. But if atheism is going to bite harder, it should also bite better. While I'm happy about, for instance the flag decision, the essential dishonesty of naming the minor child as a plaintiff when such conditions were clearly untrue only speaks to how important the label or word was, and not the effect. Sadly, I don't think Dr. Neudow gives a rat's behind about anything but his sullen pride. As atheism starts to bite harder, it needs to do so with integrity, or else it merely adds another charlatan voice to the cacophony.
My hope is that atheism will, someday, become about truth and knowledge, and not about label-supremacy.
But then I am only an atheist when confronted with a theist argument. My direction is not atheism but humanism and transhumanism and those are most definitely positive philosophies. As you have said before, atheism isn’t a set of doctrines or a belief system. It is purely something in opposition. Atheists must should also take up their own positive causes as well as opposing theism.
With applause. However, you do realize that you are as statistically deviant an atheist as I am a theist. There's many like us out there, but we're a small portion and because we don't have an either/or voice, people don't tend to listen to us.
Dualities--that's something we need to do away with in general.
(I want my triune bit: Yes/No/Maybe. Where is my triune bit?!)
Ahh but now we enter a different realm, and a worthwhile target, and something I hope we will always have.
That depends on the naysayers, to be honest. If it's about knowledge, then we shall always preserve this gift of the human endeavor. If it is about labels, well, the question ensues of whether we can kill it or just rename it. Can it be made less essential in this form without destroying it?
Why are people embarrassed to sing or dance?
Can’t say that I have. But then I’m afraid I rarely classify what I listen to, but I can imagine what you mean.
Fair enough. Bad jazz is like Muzak.
Hmm, yup perhaps then it is best to keep those souls away.
But how to do it ... therein lies the puzzle.
Nothing is truly evil else it would destroy itself.
Nothing is truly good else we wouldn't be in this mess.
Dualisms--that something must be good or evil is problematic.
I guess, in the long run, I'm just dismayed to see people making the same mistakes as ages past: We decide before we know, and merely presume that we ever knew.
And it's worth noting that in metaphysics, 1+1
can equal 3.
It doesn't always, but sometimes it does.
thanx,
Tiasssa
